Year: 2009

“Oh, no!” I hear you cry, “not another blog about Euchre!” Well, I do like the game, to be sure. But, more importantly, the Euchre scenario enables me to try out any new technologies on a reasonably complex problem (using Visual Basic, of course). It’s my way of checking out our product to make sure… Read more

By now you’ve likely heard about the major new features coming in VB 2010, but there’s also a number of smaller additions in the language and IDE that might not be as readily noticeable. “Hidden Gems” will be a multi-part series where we’ll explore some of these smaller enhancements. First up – serialization! Let’s… Read more

This one’s going to be long, but for those of you who’ve felt the first 3 in this series were too easy I promise this one’s tougher J. Let’s say you want to list all the customers from a table in a ComboBox, and update the UI based on which one is selected. To… Read more

In this post, I’ll continue on with coding the new playlist shuffler. If you haven’t read part 1 yet, I highly recommend it so that this post will make more sense. J Code for the controls (continued) The Title TextBox When the title changes, we’ll want to indicate that the playlist has changed, and we’ll… Read more

Way back in October 2007, I wrote up a few posts (here and here) on my experiments with the Windows Media Player object model. The problem I was trying to solve was that, when I had a playlist set to “shuffle,” WMP would break up songs that should always play together (for example, Jackson Browne’s… Read more

In yesterday’s post we saw that the use of the wrong comparison operator with Nothing in an If block can lead to surprising results. Let’s look at a slightly different case today: Dim x As Integer = Nothing If x = Nothing Then MsgBox(“A true statement – we land here”)… Read more

Microsoft has this neat mailing list called “Spot the Bug” where developers can send interesting snippets of code that look correct but actually have subtle bugs in them. The puzzles are a lot of fun and I’ve always thought it’d be a fun thing to try here on the team blog. Over the past year… Read more

There were a lot of Microsoft announcements that happened yesterday! Many of these happened during Steve Ballmer’s keynote at the SharePoint Developers Conference (Video, Twitter). Here is the list: Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and compatible versions of IronRuby/IronPython Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint (Keynote, Dev Center) New Visual Studio logo and brand (blue… Read more